Easy Braids

08/08/2017

I feel I should start this blog post with a bit of a disclaimer. I’ve never exactly been a girly girl. Yes, I do like nice dresses and shoes, and sometimes I’ve even been known to spend time getting my hair and make up right. But on the flip side I’m equally just as happy in jeans and a t-shirt with my hair scraped back in an elastic band – much as I am when sat here writing this. Little Miss C gets her hair tied back most days in either a pony tail or a plait, but, much to her disappointment, I’m not one for following long winded YouTube tutorials to be able to recreate fancy creations in her hair.

When I was at primary school there was one girl in my class that I was insanely jealous of. She had long hair, lots and lots of girly dresses, sparkle shoes and she had this “contraption” to plait not only her Barbie’s hair, but also her’s too. When I saw a request for people to review Easy Braids I saw it as an opportunity to give LMC what I had wanted so much as a child.

The idea behind Easy Braids is that it’s an easy way to put braids in your (or a friend’s hair). This battery operated, handheld machine has the hair going through three separate tube and when you pull the trigger on it the tubes move position so that the hair is braided.

Let me talk you through the steps involved.

First you use the separator to split the hair into three equal strands. There is a rubber strap on this to hold the hair in place once you’ve separated it. At this stage I’ll give you a tip – don’t try and take too much hair at once, as if you do, it won’t work in later stages. The whole thing of getting the strap in place to hold the separator still on the hair was a bit fiddly to me. Trying to also hold a phone to take photos at the same time possibly didn’t help matters. But, even when I admitted defeat with the phone I still struggled a bit. I wasn’t sure if it was LMC’s hair being too glossy, or just me being keggy handed as my late Gran would have said. Either way – I wasn’t yet seeing how the word easy applied to things.

The second stage with Easy Braids is to insert the three strand pullers into the Braider tubes from below. This bit is relatively simple. Then you start needing about three pairs of hands.

What you need to do next is take one strand of hair from the separator and load it into the strand puller.

Once you’ve done that you should pull the strand puller down so that the hair goes down the tube of the separator and is held in place. Then you do this with the remaining two strands. All whilst holding the Easy Braider itself. As I say – it seemed to require an extra pair of hands so as not to drop anything.

With the hair loaded into the tubes of the Easy Braider you just squeeze the trigger on the braider and very slowly move it down through the hair whilst the braid is braided. Depending on the speed with which you move it you can get either a tighter or looser braid result.

If you are working with long hair you might need to extend the tubes on the Easy Braider (easily down by pulling down at the bottom) to prevent the hair from getting all twisted there.

Once the braid is complete you just put a band in the bottom to secure it, or use one of the little plastic clips that come with the set. These just squeeze shut around the hair.

When braiding has been mastered (which takes a bit of time in my case!) you can then start to embellish the braids with some of the ribbons that come with it. You an tie a ribbon near the roots of your hair and use it as a strand in your braid, or just use it as part of an existing strand in the same way.

I can totally see why the Easy Braider would make a great gift for girls (or boys!) with long hair who want to braid their hair. Little Miss C spent the rest of the day showing off her braid to her brother who was becoming increasingly annoyed that his hair wasn’t long enough to be braided to. I found it quite fiddly to use, but maybe that’s because I’m just not into that kind of thing and so didn’t have as much patience as I should have done. Regardless of that though, the results are rather impressive and certainly made one girly girl in the household very happy.

One thing worth noting is that the Easy Braider requires 3 AAA batteries which are not included.